Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria-Hungary, the son of Alois Hitler and Klara Pölzl. He trained as an artist, was rejected twice by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and after being orphaned young lived in homeless shelters and the Meldemannstraße dormitory in Vienna, where he was first exposed to racist and German-nationalist rhetoric; the origins of his antisemitism remain debated among historians.

He moved to Germany in 1913 and voluntarily enlisted in the Bavarian Army in August 1914, served as a dispatch runner, was wounded at the Somme, was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack in October 1918, and received the Iron Cross First and Second Class. After the defeat he embraced the 'stab-in-the-back' myth, worked as a Reichswehr intelligence agent, joined the German Workers' Party (DAP) in September 1919, and met Dietrich Eckart. After the party crisis of June–July 1921 he was granted absolute power as party chairman on 29 July 1921, succeeding Drexler by a vote of 533 to 1.

On 8–9 November 1923 he attempted a coup in Munich with Ludendorff; it was dispersed by police, with 16 Nazis and four police officers killed. He was arrested on 11 November 1923, tried for high treason, sentenced on 1 April 1924 to five years' fortress confinement, and released on 20 December 1924, having dictated Mein Kampf to Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. He applied to renounce his Austrian citizenship on 7 April 1925, which was approved on 30 April 1925, leaving him stateless and legally ineligible for office until his Brunswick citizenship appointment of 25 February 1932 was completed on 1 March 1932.

The Great Depression, decree-based government under Brüning and Nazi electoral gains (18.3% and 107 seats in September 1930; 37.3% in July 1932) preceded the persuasion of Hindenburg by conservative politicians to appoint him chancellor on 30 January 1933; the Enabling Act of 23 March 1933 followed, and on Hindenburg's death on 2 August 1934 he became head of state.

In summer 1942 he split Army Group South into Groups A and B to strike at Caucasus oil and the Volga at the same time, which led to the encirclement and destruction of the Sixth Army. The sources differ on the date of the split (7 July versus Führer Directive 45), so the year-level 'summer 1942' framing is the defensible one. Separately documented are his Führer Directive No. 41 of 5 April 1942 setting the main effort in the south and the Caucasus oil fields, and his statement at Poltava on 1 June 1942 that he would have to end the war if Maikop and Grozny were not captured.

Responsibility for the Holocaust rests largely on Hitler and the Nazi Party leadership, though it was also perpetrated by the SS, the Wehrmacht, ordinary German citizens and collaborationist members of various European governments. He authorized the T-4 euthanasia killings in October 1939, approved the re-establishment of the Einsatzgruppen during Barbarossa planning, encouraged Einsatzgruppen killings of Eastern European Jews in a speech of July 1941, and explicitly ordered the 'annihilation of the Jews' in a speech on 12 December 1941; the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 evidences central planning. Scholarship on responsibility has largely moved beyond the intentionalist–functionalist opposition to a synthesis situating his antisemitism within the Third Reich's polycratic structures.

His regime was responsible for the genocide of an estimated six million Jews and millions of other victims, and for the deliberate killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. Pursuing Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, he oversaw the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and of the USSR in June 1941 and declared war on the United States in December 1941; his expansionist foreign policy is considered the primary cause of World War II in Europe.

On 29 April 1945 he married Eva Braun in the Führerbunker in Berlin and killed himself with a self-inflicted gunshot the next day as Soviet forces closed in. Contemporaries likened his death to a 'spell' being broken, and few Germans mourned. Ian Kershaw described him as 'the embodiment of modern political evil'. Proposed conditions in the debate over his health, including Parkinson's disease, amphetamine addiction from late 1942 and heavy medication by Theodor Morell, are contested; Eberle and Neumann conclude that despite illness he remained fully aware of and responsible for his decisions. Germany's defeat ended a phase of European history dominated by Germany and was followed by the Cold War, and many European countries have criminalised the promotion of Nazism and Holocaust denial. Historiographical treatments range from Meinecke and Trevor-Roper to Haffner's counterfactual claims, and the intentionalist–functionalist debate has largely been superseded by a synthetic account.